MacBook Air Portable Genius, 4th Edition

Improving Your E-mail Life

E-mail has been called the “killer app” of the Internet, and it certainly deserves that title. Yes, chat and instant messaging are popular. Social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn get lots of press, and microblogging sites, like Tumblr, appeal to a certain type of person. Not everyone uses these services, but it’s safe to say that almost everyone uses e-mail. In fact, if you’re like the majority of the world, you probably use e-mail all day long. This means that learning a few efficient e-mail techniques can make your day a bit easier and save you time for more important pursuits.

Configuring Mail to not show images in messages

Lots of messages nowadays come not just as plain text but with fonts, colors, images, and other flourishes. This fancy formatting, called either rich text or HTML, makes for a more pleasant e-mail experience, particularly for images. Who doesn’t like a bit of eye candy to brighten the day? Unfortunately, however, not all images are benign. A web bug is an image that resides on a remote server and is added to an HTML-formatted e-mail message by referencing an address on the remote server. Images and other objects that reside on a remote server and are not embedded in the message are called external content. When you open the message, Mail uses the address to download the image for display within the message.